To sir, with 'huh?'

Sidney Poitier's debut novel leaves the reader mystified

June 10, 2013|By Kevin Nance

If a movie is ever made of Sidney Poitier's debut novel, "Montaro Caine" — a distinct possibility, one suspects, given the history and connections of its author — it won't be the sort of film with which the great American actor has been associated for most of his distinguished career. It will be neither a probing examination of race, such as "In the Heat of the Night" or "A Raisin in the Sun," nor a raucous comedy like "Uptown Saturday Night" or "Let's Do It Again." It will almost certainly be a hot mess.

Alternately scary and squishy, derivative and dumbfounding, "Montaro Caine" is a bizarre, fitfully entertaining mélange of cardboard characters, paranoid thriller clichés and literally starry-eyed cosmological mumbo-jumbo. It lurches from cloak-and-dagger corporate warfare and espionage to a mushy mysticism about the nature of the galaxy, the fate of mankind and back again. It glues musings on fate, morality, greed, astronomy, ancient civilizations, alternative medicine and a host of other Big Themes onto the flimsy skeleton of an airport-bookstall paperback. It reads, in short, like the love child of Carl Sagan and Dan Brown of "The Da Vinci Code" fame, without Sagan's speculative sonority or Brown's breakneck narrative pace.

The book's title character, an expert metallurgist and the embattled CEO of a multinational mining company headquartered in New York, has not one but two inexplicable incidents in his background. Growing up as the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants, young Montaro comes into the possession of a small spaceship-like object carved and sent to him by an idiot savant he never met. (This object, which becomes known as the Seventh Ship, turns out to have unique properties too murky, or maybe just too ridiculous, to describe here.)

Years later, as a graduate student, Montaro is asked to examine a mysterious coin that bears the image of a constellation as seen from deep space and, even more surprising, appears to have been minted of certain materials unknown on Earth. The coin, the increasingly skeptical reader learns, was found in the closed fist of a newborn baby. To make matters extra twisty, it turns out to be part of a set; there's another, similar coin, also of otherworldly, possibly supernatural origin.

After decades of obscurity, needless to say, the coins resurface, only to become the focus of an unscrupulous billionaire collector of rare artifacts and the sleek thugs and grasping scientists he employs. Also angling for possession of the coins are a pair of kidnappers; a young pregnant woman and her husband; a laconic hermit who occasionally emerges from his hut on a remote island to perform miracle cures on terminally ill people; and Montaro himself. For nearly 300 pages, these and other players skulk, lurk, spy upon, deceive and scuffle with one another, trying to get their hands on the coins — which, like the great rings of Wagner and Tolkien, seem to have a will of their own, in at least one case apparently teleporting themselves from one place to another.

Despite endless speculation, however, the source and purpose of the coins are never explained. It becomes an article of faith that the coins are Deeply Significant, but just how, or why, is as unknowable as the exact count of those billions and billions of stars that Sagan used to go on about. Maddening to the reader (at least this one), this profoundly unresolved state of affairs seems to leave the author perfectly content.

It would be exhausting — and superfluous — to list the book's flaws of execution. Suffice it to say that character development is minimal, the wildly shifting points of view disorienting, key scenes are narrated rather than dramatized, and so on. (Poitier has clearly read a fair amount of Sagan, a dedicatee of the book, and Brown, who goes unacknowledged but whose influence declares itself on every page.) But these amount to quibbles next to the gelatinous ooze of the novel's overall concept, which is shapeless and insubstantial.

Of course I admire and honor the author, now in his mid-80s, for trying something new. But when I think of him for the rest of my life, the images that come to mind will be the brave, noble, indelible characters he created onscreen as an actor. None of them will bear the slightest resemblance to Montaro Caine.